Check out CircuIT Recruitment’s monthly insights for January 2017. A snapshot of recruitment insights from various CircuIT Consultants.

This month, Amie talks about keeping up to date with emerging technologies and trends, to further develop your contracting career. To find regular work, you need to master the skills that employers are looking for. Keeping up to date with all the latest technologies is key, especially when working for various different companies in the IT contracting space. A good tip is ensuring you to make detailed notes about techniques, and new trends, as every place is a little different. Go on courses, between contracts if you need to, and take advantage of any learning opportunities. You could be surprised what may come in handy down the line.

Dinh has observed a significant increase in client investment within the AI and machine learning domains within the past two quarters. AI seemed like a far-fetched idea over a year ago, however recently, machine learning coupled with AI has made significant strides and waves in the tech world. In the coming year, Dinh anticipates more and more systems being introduced that can actually learn and change their behaviour, which will in turn create more intelligent devices. As it stands, all the tech giants (Google, Apple, Amazon, IBM, etc.) are all jockeying to become to go-to company for AI. In brief, the company that dominates the AI platform (i.e., the piece of software that other companies build on and that consumers cannot do without), will be THE company of the future. Microsoft dominated the PC market because its Windows platform became the centrepiece of the software world, and Google has dominated the internet through its search function. It will indeed now be fascinating to see which company will steer the tech industry for years to come. As stated by the world’s leading technologists, whoever wins this race will dominate the next stage of the information age, with AI, machine learning and big-data technology set to re-make how we live and thrive from day to day.

Brad has witnessed the strong start to the New Year in terms of job vacancies, and a strong trend for clients looking to hire permanent staff to retain the IP. There are more Manual Test Analysts vacancies available within his client base, but a large number of suitable candidates vying for these positions. It is very much a buyer’s market for Manual Test Analysts. Salaries and daily rates have remained stable or come down in recent years. Microsoft Developers with experience with Sitecore, AWS elasticsearch, continue to see high demand for their services, and have multiple opportunities at their disposal.

Aoife has observed a relatively new trend in the Cloud adoption space, she has noticed that some of her clients are moving towards the use of cloud-first strategies. This focus brings a list of benefits to an organisation, some of these being a reduction in hosting costs, a decrease in labour costs, improved collaboration and overall productivity and lastly, streamlined operations. Aoife believes these benefits extend further to keeping a company running a smooth Agile environment

Iain has noticed an increase in his clients implementing functional programming languages including Scala, Clojure and more recently, Go. Go, which is also referred to as “Golang,” is a compiled systems-oriented programming language started by Google in 2007. Go can be considered the result of a rather conservative language evolution from languages such as C and C++. Even though the Go candidate market is short (especially with commercial experience), Iain has found out that Go is growing in popularity based on its performance levels. The high performance is in large part due to the static compilation of the statically-typed Go code. A lot of optimisations are possible when a compiler can do all the code inspection work beforehand, as opposed to the dynamic JS compiler work done during runtime.

On a more trivial, but yet significant (!) note, Louise has flagged the adoption of lithium metal battery technology. 2016 proved that if you're not very careful in how you manufacture batteries and the technology surrounding them, things can go atrociously wrong!! In 2017, there’ll be renewed focus on increasing the safety and longevity of lithium-ion technology. So with respect to lithium metal battery technology, an MIT spinout is preparing to commercialise a novel rechargeable lithium metal battery that offers double the energy capacity of the lithium ion batteries that power many of today’s consumer electronics. It is exciting to note that SolidEnergy Systems has developed an anode-free lithium metal battery with several material advances that make it twice as energy-dense, yet just as safe and long-lasting as the lithium ion batteries used in mobile phones, electric cars, drones, etc. So let’s hope for less phone charging in the year to come!

This month, Cecile talks Agile. Agile is not only a buzzword in IT but also a way of life for (most) companies within the industry, but the methodology that relies heavily on a collaborative open plan approach, is steadily expanding its industrial scope and becoming a staple in industries out with the software development umbrella. For example, editorial staff regularly hold scrum meetings, facilitating a steady flow of ideas as well as utilising Kanban software for organising articles. Scrum has also featured heavily in the finance world for almost half a decade. In addition to these discreet examples, agile project management is predicted to creep into all industries, from graphic design and UX, to visibly revolutionising pet product development and construction management. IT will no longer have a monopoly on the project management technique as this year will see many more industries introduce agile into its daily workflow and as a result experience the professional benefits that the methodology has to offer.